the green notebook : , regarding a snow day,

Today is a snow day, with school buses cancelled for both children, as well as Rose’s basketball tournament. Her team was scheduled to land at Ashbury College, a private school in Rockcliffe Park. The late Matthew Perry (1969-2023) went there, you know, as did Ottawa poet Max Middle (pseudonym of Mark Robertson). Up to 10cm today, online sources suggest. I should probably move the car up the driveway, for the sake of the snowplow.

Today is a snow day. Each school sends an email, and Christine forwards, to make sure I saw. She is in Edmonton all this week running courses for work. Edmonton, far warmer than here, at least this week. Above zero, she says. Yesterday, we were minus twelve, which was an improvement over the prior few days. Once again, I pick up Etel Adnan, her Surge (2018):

I also hear the air flowing with it, its unbroken surface leading one’s imagination to more water, more destabilization, more wind.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through four drafts of proofs for my collection Snow day (2025), a book out as soon as we clear all corrections. A sequence of sequences, held by the title sequence, one composed at the prompt of another snow day, back in 2019. The snow fell and it fell and both children remained home.

I’m all for a snow day. I’m tempted to return to the extended prose poem, as I did for the original “snow day” poem, six years ago. How different or similar I might play with the form. Where might this go.

Our young ladies in their corners, on their devices. They are eight and eleven years old. The snow, falls. Outside, the snowplow. If everything, seasons. The snowplow, attends. The ground, and the groundless. A stellar cold. For why, the lament. Alta Vista: snow descends in straight lines. These shadows, blue. The rules of the game. Nothing rests. What the tides don’t permit.

Yesterday, a cluster of birds.

Rose is attending a craft. If anyone, to witness. Can I have this box. I want to make something out of this box. Yes, you can have that box.

*

A temporality. Emails, from both of their schools, from the snowplow company. It is here, it is coming. Snow. How many words for it. Remain in your homes, they say. Our young ladies, relieved. Blizzard, onding. An outcrop of flurries.

The air, a crispness. A sharp edge. I brush layers from the car, abandon sentences. Return to the house.

Mid-morning, I tell the young ladies to put away their devices. They spend the rest of the day taking turns coming in to request things or register their complaints of the other. By early afternoon, a silence. They are in the dining room, quietly playing a card game.

As I wrote on social media, responding to another: my poems these days seem to be composed through me stepping directly into the middle of the poem and pushing out in every direction, until I am finally able to free myself.

I used to write poems that began at the beginning and moved their ways forward until finding the end. It seems I do something else, now.

*

Jeff Weingarten prods me via email, reminding me that I agreed to write a blurb for the collected letters of John Newlove, which he’s been working on for more years than he would probably wish to consider. Apparently the collection is due to land in print this year. After a few back-and-forths, we agree on this as my blurb for the back cover:

It is good to hear John’s voice again through these letters, back from those days when letters (well before the advent of emails, text messages) were a stronger means of communication between writers, between poets. As Weingarten offers in his detailed introduction, this is where battles were fought, shots were lobbied, generosities offered and questions answered, all of which John composed in thoughtful detail. Every gesture was for the sake of the work. Weingarten puts the spotlight on an important Canadian poet and the context in which he existed, across a wide-ranging literature.

Winnipeg poet and lawyer Chimwemwe Undi is announced as Canada’s 11th Parliamentary Poet Laureate. From her Scientific Marvel (2024): “All that distance, / built.”

*

The snowfall eases, drifts. By mid-afternoon, the streets and sidewalks plowed, some more than once. More than a few times. I convince the young ladies to get dressed, and we prepare to head out for Aoife’s ukulele lesson. Our first and only outing.

 

Arleen Paré, Time Out of Time

 

in the Canadian Rockies bears speak
neither English nor French nor Kutenai
nor Arabic  nor will they stay
inside their considerable mountain-side squares

to sight a grizzly
at the far end of a trail
is both bespoke
lucky   and not

the screed granite walls
the brief sunlight there
casting
overlong shadows

language then
is of little assistance
you are forced
to fall back on unfortified faith

thank you   mouthing thank you
and please
addressing the universe
mouthing no thank you too

the common grizzly
can cover vast distances
faster than the word
fear (“Etel Adnan 29”)

I was curious to see Victoria, British Columbia poet Arleen Paré’s latest collection, Time Out of Time (Qualicum Beach BC: Dagger Editions / Caitlin Press, 2022), a collection that takes as its immediate prompt of a particular work by the late Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021). As Paré writes as part of a “Note from the Author” to open the collection: “In April, my poet friend Maureen Hynes suggested I read Time by Etel Adnan. It was love at first page. The poems in Time are spare and exquisitely structured. And then I discovered the remarkable Etel Adnan herself! […] In 2020, Time won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Fully smitten, I have employed the poetics in Time to shape this tribute collection.” (The note also offers that Adnan died just as the book was going to press.)

There’s something not only ambitious but ultimately daring in declaring one’s intentions at the offset: any reader could easily move to the source material and ultimately compare the two. Some things can’t be helped, I suppose. On her part, Paré is the author of more than a half-dozen published collections (although this is the first of her titles I’ve seen not published by Brick Books), including Paper Trail (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2007), Lake of Two Mountains (London ON: Brick Books, 2014) [see my review of such here], He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press, 2015) and First (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021). And while Paré isn’t Adnan (nor is she, through this collection, aiming or claiming to be), the shift in her own work through this collection is interesting: composed from the place where her interest and Adnan’s meet, and expanding upon those possibilities of influence. “This is what a blessing is,” Paré writes, to open the poem “A Blessing,” set between poems “33” and “34,” “forty years   waking up every morning side by side / leaving the house through the front door   enduring so little   a blessing [.]”

Interestingly enough, Etel Adnan’s TIME (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], was my first introduction to Adnan’s work as well, furthering my own reading of her work with Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] before beginning to move slowly into her backlist, and echoes of influence have certainly rippled through my own writing, repeatedly, since. Which is to say, naturally, that I understand Paré’s impulse, and admire her ambition for taking on a book-length response to another book (there must be other examples, but I’m unable to think of any at the moment). Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, TIME is constructed out of six extended lyric sequences that work through threads of meditative fragments across temporal stretches well beyond the immediate composition of the poems themselves, but across the length and breath of the author’s own nine decades of experience, yet with an immediacy that focuses upon the small moment in striking ways. Paré’s forty-nine part numbered sequence, “Etel Adnan,” makes up the collection Time Out of Time, set with the occasional other poem folded between, also works across those small and large moments, offering her thoughts on Adnan’s work and of the author, moving across a layering of how she reads Adnan’s temporality against her own: “I want to follow you / into your small / verbal squares / elegant   spare / enough cut / enough cut [.]” (“Etel Adnan 2”). In certain ways, Time Out of Time takes a while to lift itself beyond initial influence—nearly the first third, in fact—although there are moments from the offset that certainly sparkle. There is something quite magical in the fifth section, where she writes: “she  a small moveable organism / bespeaking hope / even when hope is in hiding [.],” but less so in the following section, that writes: “I now know what you look like / on Google / you smile / you are seated / you speak English Arabic French and / you write in all three / you paint / small squares of colour / you are now ninety-six / I know you best / in your small squares of mentation [.]”

Pop Culture 1

Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian?... In part because she has been
“ghosted”—or made to seem invisible by culture itself.
—Terry Castle

In the last century   the twentieth   the late nineteen-nineties   everyone wanted
to be a lesbian   this may be an exaggeration   maybe not everyone   maybe not
Pope Saint Paul II or John Ashbery or Sarah Palin   but many   enough   lesbians
being the media darlings of that period of time   TV   magazines   photomontages
the lesbian at last   at long long last   becoming visible   transmuting the zeitgeist
a time out of time   refreshingly free of sham
if you can’t bring back the past
                                                in time you can
                                                                        bring forth the future.

From what I’ve seen of Paré’s previous work, her impulse is less the disjointed fragment than the narrative through-line, so in comparison, Adnan’s work offers a compactness and the suggestion of an otherwise-overt connective tissue between (although I don’t know if my comprehension of Paré’s writing is slanted through only being aware of her titles published through Brick). Moving through an exploration of the structure of Adnan’s lyric, Paré’s lines engaged with a particular level of sparseness, and the possibility of writing a narrative line across individual points that begin to accumulate, instead of a more overt narrative through-line. Time Out of Time writes out an examination of time, and of her own time, including climate, mass extinction and the forty years she’s spent with her wife, weaving elements in and around each other, both attentive and attuned, and simultaneously open-hearted and reserved. As she writes to open “Etel Adnan 22”: “you say on page 82 that the heart / sets up its own heart equations / I say you are nowhere in sight // concerning time / no one understands / its substance [.]” This really is a fascinating project, and interesting to see Paré work so deliberately and overtly beyond the boundaries of her poetics-to-date. It brings an introduction of a particular kind of abstract to her work as well, rippling across each page. “how would a rose be known,” she offers, as part of “Etel Adnan 33,” “without those four letters to frame it [.]” The real measure for this particular kind of project, in many ways, will be to see how Paré’s work moves forward from this point. I’m looking forward to it.

Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence

 

Yes. The shifting, after the return of the tide, and my own. A question rushes out of the stillness, and then advances an inch at a time: has this day ever been before, or has it risen from the shallows, from a line, a sound?

When we name things simply, with words preceding their meaning, a cosmic narration takes place. does the discovery of origins remove their dust? The horizon’s shimmering slow down all other perceptions. It reminds me of a childhood of emptiness which seems to have taken me near the beginnings of space and time.

Now, dark animals roam in the forest, you could touch them. A particular somnolence takes hold of you when the shadows start growing. Then, the heart creates different beats. You want to touch the leaves, look intensely at each tree. The night falls, already tired, already bare.

The latest from Beirut-born Parisian (having relocated to France after decades living in California) poet and painter Etel Adnan is Shifting the Silence (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2020). Shifting the Silence is an extended lyric meditation composed, the press release offers, as “Adnan grapples with the breadth of her life at ninety-five, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own approaching death.” It is interesting how Adnan’s approach isn’t to write against silence, but, perhaps, instead, through those same silences, attempting to articulate what those silences provide, and everything she has accumulated along the way, as she rises to meet it. She writes of her own silences, and the silences of history, and of war. She writes of trauma and tragedies overlooked, and some forgotten, some deliberately so. Early on in the book, she writes: “And having more memories than yearnings, searching in unnameable spaces, Sicily’s orchards or Lebanon’s thinning waters, I reach a land between borders, unclaimed, and stand there, as if I were alone, but the rhythm is missing.” She writes of silences that cause damage, and others meant to heal. She writes of the silences that death might bring, which is itself, a method of forgetting.

Composed in English, Shifting the Silence is her first book since the publication of Time (Nightboat, 2019), a volume of her poems translated from French into English by Sarah Riggs, a book that won the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize [see my review of such here]. Admittedly only the second title by Adnan I’ve read, the sense I have from these two works is her engagement with the lyric sentence, composing meditations and commentary on writing, war, geopolitical and social histories and the ongoing the beauty of physical landscapes. She writes of contemporary and ongoing wars in the Middle East, climate change, ancient histories and the view from her window. Shifting the Silence, structured as a sequence of prose lyrics, is composed as both meditation and, as she writes, an “incantation,” on living and a life lived; a series of lives lived. She offers: “We have to reconnect what words separated.”

There were times when to be overlooked by death created sacred terror, and those times have returned. The rivers continued to run. I followed some, and others I drew. Most frequently they came as dreams, some were of an amazing magnitude, others mixed their waters in oversized waterfalls. I loved them in all instances. But death, I didn’t.

Death abandoned us, not coming when it was due, not answering. Its enemy, a form of life unstoppable, I mean the Oceans, used to appear on stage for events of gigantic dimensions. They spoke human languages besides their own. We pushed them back gradually, polluted them to the brim. We heard not a single cry.

Io cannot die. Prometheus cannot rest. The oceans are helpless. As for us, we can neither live, nor disappear. The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath. My window is blessed. It opens in daylight on the fields of Greece, that’s what I’m trying to believe.

One thread of the book is anchored in the Mediterranean, where so much is still held in conflict and tragedy, and impossible to overlook. When looking ahead to one’s end, one so often looks back to beginnings, and ideas of home, and Adnan’s sense of home is complex, from her Parisian view to her decades in California, to her earlier days in Beirut. Her sense of her place is simultaneously specific and unspecified, as though her sense of home, itself, contains multitudes. “I would have been an archeologist,” she writes, “and would have found a necklace in pure gold, and wondered to whom it had belonged. Not necessarily a woman. I’m a passenger on planet Earth, itself a passerby. The empire crushed as if it were made of cardboard, and we retrieved some memories which will die with us, or survive, for a while… But everything lasts just for a while, probably eternity itself.” This is a book of nearing endings, but it is not an end, or the end; not in the least. And one can only hope that there might be further miles for her yet to travel. As part of an interview with Adnan on her two artistic threads—painting and writing—for a June 2018 article in Apollo magazine, Gabriel Coxhead writes:

I ask her about this sense of a split, this division in her creative output. ‘I’ve thought about this many times,’ she replies. ‘I didn’t plan it, but looking back you’re right. If I were just a painter, maybe my work would have been different, more encompassing. But my writing is rather pessimistic, because of the angle of history I got involved with, being born in Beirut. Also, it’s because words are social. I think it’s more natural if an event bothers you to express it in words. Art also is a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. And although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of time where I could forget about the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me.’

 

Etel Adnan, TIME; translated by Sarah Riggs

the sun came out at night

to go for a stroll and the divine crossed

the room. the windows

opened

writing comes from a dialogue

with time; it’s made

of a mirror in which thought

is stripped and no longer knows

itself

in Palermo men are as

strictly trained as horses; or

else they have the shining violence of

flowers (“At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon”)

The latest poetry title by Etel Adnan to appear in English translation is TIME (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019), translated from the French by Sarah Riggs. TIME is constructed out of six extended lyric sequences—“October 27, 2003,” “Friday, March 25^th at 4pm,” “At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon,” Return from London,” “No Sky” and “Ballbeck”—each of which are clearly situated, whether in a particular time or place (or both), tethered to the ground so the abstract of her lyric thinking won’t float away completely. The poems are situated very specifically, but are open enough to include everything; rooted in place, as she writes in the first sequence: “those who cannot leave / discover the geography / of the body. there are also airfields / and harbors on the surface of our souls.” Adnan’s sequences explore violence, culture, power and memory, composing small abstract moments that accumulate in a way that echoes for anyone even faintly familiar with contemporary French writing, but in a way that also reminds me of the work of the late Canadian poet D.G. Jones, another poet who stretched out the sequence from accumulated small abstracts (and a poet who was also influenced by French writing, although through his translations of the work of the late Quebec poet Anne Hébert, a writer born a decade earlier than Adnan).

it’s more bearable to think of

death than of love

Greek thought explored

all things the way it

explored the islands

when men no longer have

power over women, over whom

will they have it? (“At 2 p.m. in the Afternoon”)

In her “Translator’s Note,” Brooklyn, New York poet and translator Sarah Riggs writes “I recall Cole Swensen saying how to translate means you feel the other under your own skin. And, I would add, under and into your own writing.” She begins her note:

The postcard is a medium Etel Adnan loves, and often when translating this work I felt echoes of the circumstances in which it began. On October 27, 2003, Etel received a postcard at her home in Paris from her friend, Khaled Najar, the Tunisian poet and publisher of Tawbad Editions. Spontaneously she wrote the first of the poem sequences in this book, each poem a breath or two, thinking of Khaled. In this way the poems act like a correspondence, a poetry of the postcard, from one Arab writer to another.

The translator occupies the recto-verso position of not being able to be fully on both side, having to choose one language while thinking deeply of the other language, and of a third address which is the person or people “out there.” As a poet and translator of poetry in French, I found myself in the autumn of 2005 at a café in Paris reading Le 27 Octobre 2003, and wanting to translate it. So I asked Etel if she was going to write/translate it also in English. Etel responded very simply and enthusiastically as is her way, “I’d rather you did it.”

At first it felt like pouring water from one pitcher to another, to translate these poems, so clear and lucid and succinctly chosen was each word. One short poem on each page, with Khaled’s facing page translation in Arabic, gave me lots of room to ruminate on which words to choose. Part of the passion of translating a first draft as I scrawl it into the book in pencil is partly that I can be anywhere. It had the pleasure of the postcard—writing vicariously to Khaled, writing as if you are Etel, writing to you who are readers in English; so many sides, positions, and dimensions. I was on a rooftop in Morocco when I first translated the little volume of No Sky, and can remember the cloud formations of that day.

There is a lot happening in these meditative postcards, from bombs dropping in Beruit to a return to Greece, sculptures or stripmining in California, composing a sequence of lyric sketches aware of and very concerned with how easily humanity turns against itself and its own interests, from the larger issues of planetary survival, to the intimate matters of how one person treats another. “this morning I killed a fly,” she writes, in “No Sky,” “had I been a State / I would have destroyed a city [.]” Yet her poems are filled with such a wonder and an openness, one that shows a wisdom, and, despite everything, an optimism and heart.

What is interesting, also, is that this translation also counts as the first publication of these sequences as a unit, making one wonder who made the choice for putting such together as a full-length collection and in what order. The acknowledgements at the opening of the collection offer that the first five sections were each originally published in French by Tawbad, in 2008, 2007, 2010, 2010 and 2008. At the end of her note, Riggs offers that “Etel and I together named the book,” although that doesn’t entirely answer the question.